The Multi-purpose Hybrid Research Reactor for High-tech Applications (MYRRHA), currently under construction at the Belgian Nuclear Research Center (SCK-CEN) in Mol Belgium, is easily the most technically ambitious reactor built in Europe in a generation. It has been designed to be fuelled by “Spent Nuclear Fuel” or “nuclear waste” as decreed by Kenya Anti-Nuclear Alliance (KANA) zealots, to produce life-saving cancer-treating medical isotopes. At the computational centre of MYRRHA, which will also be used to test materials for the next generation of nuclear reactors, sits a thermal-fluid design I would’ve never even heard of had not spent a few months SCK-CEN working on MYRRHA’s Primary Gas Cover and Ventilation System (PGCVS).
But this multi-billion Euro project is the only place Flownex the South African software built in Potchefstroom by engineers at M-Tech Industrial, is being used. Across the pond, NASA uses it to model Thermal hydraulics and fluid mechanics.
Greece’s former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, once called Africa “the intellectual hinge on which the door to the Atomic Age” opened, ushering in a brand new world. In his “Technofeudalism,” he has since identified how light of this new technological epoch he has named his book after, that is, dominated by the digital economy residing in a cloud domiciled in a network of data centres, Africa is once again at the centre of the supply of an increasing share of the world’s digital labour. Joy Buolamwini’s research at MIT, since published as a book titled “The Coded Gaze,” shows the paradox of computer vision algorithms trained on datasets curated by Africans in Africa, systematically exclude recognition of Africans when deployed on the very Africans who trained them. Kenyan annotators, working through platforms like Scale AI and Sama, trained intelligence embedded in Large Language Models that have subsequently dismantled the likes of Chegg.
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ChatGPT, for example, was partially assembled in Nairobi. African labour shaped the cognitive backbone of this industry that extracted the commercial value and repatriated the profits to San Francisco. Eerily, like Cotton Yarn Industrialization that had supply chains of slave labour on cotton fields in the “New World” originating in Africa, the digital economy has encoded the exclusions of its builders.
Digital, Nuclear convergence
AI tools have since grown past LLMs, and most are no longer toddlers who need Kenyans to physically hold their hands as they learn to walk. With a single hyperscale AI computation site, the type of cloud providers and AI training operations require drawing between 20 and 100 megawatts continuously. AI is now prepubescent teenagers who need energy to power their growth spurt.
It is currently very expensive for, say, iColo Data Centre’s new NBO-2 to host, say, a quantum computing installation that requires ultra-stable, ultra-scalable power supplied with minimal frequency variation. Other industries that will ride the AI boom and dominate the next growth era, such as automated manufacturing lines and industrial hydrogen electrolysis, are also not heavy electricity consumers.
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The Digital Savannah can only be built on a Silicon Savannah with rivers of cheap, clean, and safe electricity criss-crossing the landscape so that our young, urbanized, and technically competent workforce can ride the crest of this new age of digital innovation that must be hosted in a cloud that is domiciled in a data centre.
Our digital start-ups, like Duck Analytics, cannot remain globally competitive if hosted on infrastructure powered by vibes and grids designed for smaller countries with no digital ambitions.
Once completed, Egypt’s four VVER-1200 reactors at the El-Dabaa Nuclear Power Plant on the Mediterranean coastline will flood the desert with 4800 MWe. This is more electricity than what East Africa produces. Egypt has greater solar potential than the whole of East Africa combined.
